


The song of old lovers

by Dienda



Category: True Detective
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 19:37:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5428193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienda/pseuds/Dienda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s learning Rust’s life through the marks on his body, little by little, like he never thought to do during the seven years they spent sitting across each other at CID.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The song of old lovers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackeyedblonde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/gifts).



> A very late birthday fic for the wonderful Hannah. A million thanks to Miss Allie for beta-reading this story, and for all the encouragement while I was writing.

The night has that quiet, balmy quality of early spring, deep shades of blue and the distant song of a stray cricket. In the bedroom, Marty reads an old pulp novel with his glasses perched low on his nose; it’s still early to go to bed but they’ve had a long day and the night’s so sweet it feels wrong to disturb it with the jarring din of the television. Rust pads in from the bathroom, towel draped around his shoulders, ass bare and still damp from a hot shower.

Marty follows him with his eyes, peering over the rim of his glasses, watches him rub one terrycloth corner against his hair and between his legs, leaning down to dry the hard curve of his calves.

“Hey,” he says when Rust tosses the towel over the back of a chair. He puts his book aside and frowns at the other man. “C’mere, let me look at that.”

Rust looks down at himself but doesn’t see anything strange, just his naked body in the amber glow of the lamp. “What?”

“Just―” When he’s close enough, Marty grabs his arm and pulls him down onto the mattress with a low chuckle.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rust mutters but doesn’t move from where he’s ended up sprawled on his back, legs tangled with Marty’s. He yawns and closes his eyes. They just spent a few hours out in the yard, mowing the lawn and weeding, planting purple hydrangeas in the far corner, yellow pansies by the back porch. He still has the smell of clean soil in his nose and all the hard work’s left him sore and loose-limbed but not exhausted.

“Got you.” Marty smiles and settles on his side, braces himself on one elbow and examines Rust intently. It’s been almost a year since they came out of Carcosa. A handful of months since that Thursday night when Rust leaned over the console at a stop light and kissed him for the first time. Sometimes Marty can’t quite believe it happened, that it’s Rustin Cohle sharing his bed, pressed against him in the lull of sleep, warm and solid in his arms whenever they make love.

He reaches out to trace the fine arch of an eyebrow, runs a fingertip along the seam of Rust’s smile and follows the line of his jaw, the hill of his Adam’s apple to the hollow of his throat. His hand smooths down the plane of the other man’s chest and around the curve of his ribs without any heat or intention beyond the pleasure of knowing that he can, that Rust will let him touch every inch of bare skin, every single scar.

“How’s this doing?” Marty presses lightly on the line crossing Rust’s gut, the edge is still pink but not as angry and puckered as in those first few months.

“’s fine,” Rust answers with another yawn.

He’s learning Rust’s life through the marks on his body, little by little, like he never thought to do during the seven years they spent sitting across each other at CID. Marty knows the jagged scratch on Rust’s left knee came from climbing a tree when he got chased by a moose at thirteen. The curved line on his lower back is a knife wound right after Crash joined the Iron Crusaders. He got his right thumb caught by a hook on one of the fishing boats out in Alaska.

There are some scars he doesn’t know about yet: the dozen or so scratches on his shins, the tiny round dip beneath his right ear, the almost invisible half-moons spread on the back of both arms that Marty suspects were made by fingernails. Sometimes he wishes he’d seen Rust like this ten, seventeen years ago, so he’d have an image to compare to the skin beneath his hands, something beyond the superficial.

“How d’you get this one?” he asks, running his index finger along a straight scar on Rust’s right shoulder; it runs about three inches, right at the edge of his collarbone.

“In a bar brawl,” Rust says and his lips curl into a half smile. “Two assholes started fighting over a lost bet, fucker got me with a broken bottle.”

“That during your illustrious stint as a bartender?”

Rust nods. “Up north. Threw them out into the snow.”

Marty caresses the scar one last time before continuing his exploration. There are other marks he doesn’t have to ask about. There’s a darker patch of skin on one of his thighs that is the fraternal twin to the one on Marty’s left calf; they had to chase a perp across an abandoned farm and over a wire fence that was way less sturdy than it looked. Marty can still remember Maggie’s laughter as she patched them up and administered tetanus shots.

His hand brushes the gunshots on Rust’s side, the three metal slugs still caught dormant somewhere beneath the skin, now as part of the other man as the blue of his eyes. Marty’s fingers wander up to the white scratch marring Rust’s left eyebrow. He doesn’t have to ask about it, doesn’t have to look down at his own knuckles to know he was the one who put it there.

“Jesus, Rust,” he mutters with a helpless scowl. They’ve talked about it, have apologized and forgiven each other in every conceivable way but Marty knows he’ll never stop regretting that day, as long as he lives.

Rust’s eyes finally open and they land square on the thin scar crossing the bridge of Marty’s nose. He can still feel the impact on the back of his hand when he landed the blow, a phantom pain that followed him across the country, through ten years of cold and bitterness.

“Marty―” Rust hesitates. This is something he’s never mentioned before; something he fully expected when he came back to Louisiana ―the few times he allowed himself to imagine an encounter with Marty― but that still stung like an open wound when he finally had the other man in front of him. “Y’know, back in May when we first―at the bar, after you left the Station.” He huffs out an empty laugh. “I was sure you were gonna swing at me, that you still…well.”

Marty sighs. “When you flagged me down in that damned truck and your fucking nonchalance, I―Jesus, I think I wanted to. For a second there it felt like I was still in that parking lot, like I’d spent the whole decade stuck in that fucking moment.”

Rust’s throat tightens at that. “So you hated me for ten years?”

“No, Rust.” Marty sags on the mattress, face pinched with pain. It’s a long moment before he speaks again. “I hated you, _really_ hated you, for about two months, Maggie for a bit longer than that. After that… I just hated myself.” He smooths the scar with the pad of his thumb. “Most of the time it―I tried to quit thinking about you altogether. Missed you too much.”

Rust blinks hard at the ceiling, manages to catch a tear in the length of his eyelashes. There was a time in that ten-year gulf when he couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t Marty. The way he drank his coffee. How he’d scowl at the computer screen when they switched from the typewriters. The way he closed the car door when he was tired and turned the radio down when he thought Rust was dozing off. All the conversations they’d had, from awkward to friendly to outright fights. He’d hear his voice in the busy racket of the docks and the exact ring of his laughter when the sky was a certain shade of blue.

“I could never hate you,” he murmurs, so low the words are more air than voice.

Marty cups Rust’s face, brings their foreheads together. “Rust―”

Rust shakes his head, covers Marty’s hand with his own. “Done is done, Marty. It’s behind us now, it’s alright.”

They grow quiet, sad; Rust naked on his back, Marty curled against his side, the yellow light from the bedside lamp falling on them like a blanket. Marty’s hand starts wandering again, fingers softer, slower, rubbing back and forth along Rust’s arm until they land on another scar he knows all too well: the pale stripe where Rust got burned with the hot muzzle of the AK, the day they found Reggie Ledoux.

Marty remembers that night, how they stumbled into Rust’s apartment, bone-tired and half delirious, the panic he felt when Rust passed out in his arms; the part of Marty that’d perhaps been a good dad at some point wanted nothing more than to call an ambulance, drag him to the hospital. Hold him tight and make him better just by wishing alone.

“Did you ever tell her?” Rust asks and they both know what he means.

Marty shakes his head, scoffs. “Guess I always figured I’d tell her on my deathbed or something like that. When it was too late to make a difference.” It wasn’t until years after the split that Marty understood that it was the kind of secret that would’ve made him a better man in Maggie’s eyes. “You ever tell anyone?”

“I swore I wouldn’t.” Rust tilts his head so he can catch the blue of Marty’s eyes. “Just you and me, partner.”

The air changes around them, seems to relax and stretch on its back, lulled into an easy silence, and they’re almost on the edge of sleep when Marty’s fingers dip into the valley of Rust’s stomach; he rubs at the crest of one hip, like he can smooth it back into something less pronounced.

“You’re still too thin. Thinner than you were back then.”

Rust’s lips curl into a smile “Mmmh. Don’t remember you givin’ me this kind of examination back in ‘95.”

Marty snorts. “Course you don’t, you were fucked up out of your mind half of the time.”

“Well,” Rust’s eyes fall heavy on his again. “What you gonna do about it?”

“Reckon I’m gonna keep you, fatten you up.”

“I meant,” Rust takes Marty’s hand and guides it down to the building heat between his legs. “If you’re gonna grope me like this you better kiss me at some point.”

“Can do that,” Marty answers with a coy smile and leans in to brush their lips together. “Like this?”

Rust groans and shifts to slot their bodies together, gives him a proper kiss.

Marty feels Rust fill and harden in his hand as he strokes him slow and steady, how he knows Rust likes it. He presses his lips to the scar Rust’s brow, to the indelible trace of his own fists. He has the urge to kiss every single inch of the other man’s skin, the freckles on his shoulders, the harsh line of his ribs, the hollow of his armpits; to learn with his lips the different textures of his body, from the silkiness of his inner thighs to the rough pads of his fingertips. And he swears he’ll never grow tired of this, of swimming Rust’s body like a river, the same shores, the same dips and turns but always new, always enough to drag him into its current.

“I love you,” Marty says in a hushed whisper and pulls Rust in for another kiss. This is the second time he’s said it; the first it sparkled and burst in the breathless tinnitus after a nightmare.

Rust’s breath hitches at the words. He can’t say it back so he settles for moaning into Marty’s mouth and arching his back so they’re impossibly closer. It’s not that he doesn’t feel it, quite the contrary; it scares the fuck out of him being so sloppily in love with Marty, like he hasn’t been in a long time. Like he doesn’t remember being before. After all they’ve been through, after he’d resigned himself to death and loneliness.

He remembers an old song Claire used to play on her mother’s old turntable, the melancholy words rising languid from the grooved vinyl: _el amor es simple y a las cosas simples las devora el tiempo_. Love is simple and simple things get devoured by time. That’s always been true of his life; every love he’s ever had has shattered in his hands like spun glass. But Rust tells himself there’s more than love between them; they share seven years of reluctant friendship, an entire decade of absence ―of longing if they’re being honest. They share one and a hundred secrets. And he holds on to the hope that now they both know better than to tighten their fingers around this feeling.

“Tell me what you want,” he pants instead as he tugs at Marty’s boxers. “Anything you want.”

Marty groans and rolls onto his back, pulls Rust with him, shifts them until the other man is cradled between his thighs.

“Fuck me, Rust. Please.” He presses a kiss to Rust’s shoulder. “Like this. Please, please.”

And this is another thing neither of them expected after that first kiss. Marty never thought he’d offer himself like this to another man, to anyone, that he’d ever trust someone enough to let them do that to him; never imagined he’d come to love the feeling of having Rust inside him.

After a quick fumble with Marty’s clothes and the bedside drawer Rust hitches one of Marty’s legs around his waist and starts preparing him in quick, careful movements. When he finally pushes inside him Rust has to stop for a moment, reign his breathing in, Marty’s heat around him almost too good to bear.

“C’mon, babe. Please.” Marty bucks his hips and tugs Rust down for a heated kiss.

It takes a while to find their rhythm, brisk and deep, they’re pressed too close together but tonight they couldn’t stop kissing if the world came crashing down around them. The sounds Marty’s making burst gold and white in Rust’s head, like warm starlight, go straight to his cock and soon his thrusts turn fast and sloppy, his own voice turned tight and breathless. He reaches between them and wraps a firm hand around Marty’s length.

Marty feels Rust’s hand on him and his heart leaps in his chest; too much, the feeling of Rust above and inside him, like he’s a part of Marty and they’re only one body. Not a minute later Marty clutches at Rust’s shoulders and comes apart with a broken moan.

Rust gets drawn in the trembling heat of Marty’s release, feels it in the hollow of his bones and, after a final thrust, he bucks and sobs into the amber glow between them. He leaves a panting kiss on Marty’s shoulder and sags against him, lungs full and aching. For a moment he feels like he has two hearts inside his chest, Marty’s and his, and they’re one of those Siamese creatures described by the ancient Greeks, conjoined and monstrous and perfectly whole.

“I do, Marty,” he blurts out, forehead pressed against the strong jaw of the man he loves. “So fucking much.”

Marty doesn’t answer but Rust feels a broad hand cup the back of his neck as the arms around him tighten. They should pull apart and clean up but they stay right there, seamed together in the golden light of their bedside table.

“I want to plant a clementine tree in the backyard. I want to see it grow,” Rust says because all the other words he wants to speak right now would catch and stumble in his throat.

Marty lets out a soft chuckle and holds him closer, like he’s something precious, and Rust smiles and thinks about the distance between atoms.

“We’ll get one. Plant it by the fence, set a couple of chairs underneath when it’s big enough to give some shade.”

Rust can already taste the fragrant juice of the fresh fruit, the even sweeter tang of the life ahead of them.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and general vibe of this fic are inspired by Jacques Brel's most excellent [La chanson des vieux amants](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecux7v9OSXE).
> 
> The song Rust mentions is [Canción de las simples cosas.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP5mClOy2Ew)


End file.
